Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Jeffrey Goldberg admits what Obama and Kerry still don't get

You walk away from reading this piece by Jeffrey Goldberg - in which he asks President Hussein Obama and Secretary of State Kerry about their views on Iranian anti-Semitism - thinking that Obama and Kerry are naive fools.

A few days ago, I spoke with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry about the politics of the Iran deal (you can find the full interview here),
and at one point in our conversation I put to Kerry what I thought
was—to be honest—something of a gimme question: “Do you believe that
Iranian leaders sincerely seek the elimination of the Jewish state?”

Kerry responded provocatively—provocatively, that is, if you
understand Iranian leaders, and in particular the supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the way I understand them: as people
theologically committed to the destruction of Israel. Quotes such as this one
from Khamenei help lead me to this conclusion: “This barbaric,
wolflike, and infanticidal regime of Israel which spares no crime has no
cure but to be annihilated.” The supreme leader does not specialize in
nuance. (Here
is a long list of statements made by Iranian leaders concerning their
desire to bring about an end to Jewish sovereignty in any part of the
ancestral Jewish homeland.)

Kerry’s
stated understanding of the regime’s anti-Semitism is somewhat
different from mine. He told me, “I think they have a fundamental
ideological confrontation with Israel at this particular moment. Whether
or not that translates into active steps, to quote, ‘Wipe it,’ you know
…”
He paused, and so I filled in the blank: “Wipe it off the map.”

Kerry continued, “I don’t know the answer to that. I haven’t seen
anything that says to me—they’ve got 80,000 rockets in Hezbollah pointed
at Israel, and any number of choices could have been made. They didn’t
make the bomb when they had enough material for 10 to 12. They’ve signed
on to an agreement where they say they’ll never try and make one and we
have a mechanism in place where we can prove that. So I don’t want to
get locked into that debate. I think it’s a waste of time here.”

Kerry’s understanding, in shorthand: Iran is dangerous to Israel at
this moment (he repeated the term “at this moment” in his next
statement, in fact); Iran has had plenty of opportunity to hurt Israel
but has chosen not to; and, finally, the answer to the question
concerning the true intentions of Iran’s leaders when it comes to Israel
is unknowable, and also irrelevant to the current discussion.

And Kerry almost looks clairvoyant compared with what Obama told Goldberg.

“Well, we’ve discussed this before,
Jeffrey,” the president said. “I take what the supreme leader says
seriously. I think his ideology is steeped with anti-Semitism, and if he
could, without catastrophic costs, inflict great harm on Israel, I’m
confident that he would. But as I said, I think, the last time we spoke,
it is possible for leaders or regimes to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in
their worldviews and still make rational calculations with respect to
their limits and their self-preservation.”

In the May interview, I asked him to help me understand a seemingly
contradictory set of ideas he has advanced relating to Iran. I noted
that he himself has stated publicly that the regime is infected with an
anti-Semitic worldview, and that those who are infected with such a
worldview generally do not grapple well with cause-and-effect in
international politics and economics, and cannot be counted on to
interpret reality correctly. I then asked how he squares these two
observations with a third observation he has made: that the regime in
Tehran is in many ways capable of behaving according to its rational
self-interest, as American politicians understand the notion of rational
self-interest.

His answer: “Well, the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist,
doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t
preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy
afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about
how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is
anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other
considerations. You know, if you look at the history of anti-Semitism,
Jeff, there were a whole lot of European leaders—and there were deep
strains of anti-Semitism in this country—”

Here I interrupted him: “And they make irrational decisions.”

He continued: “They may make irrational decisions with respect to
discrimination, with respect to trying to use anti-Semitic rhetoric as
an organizing tool. At the margins, where the costs are low, they may
pursue policies based on hatred as opposed to self-interest. But the
costs here are not low, and what we’ve been very clear [about] to the
Iranian regime over the past six years is that we will continue to
ratchet up the costs, not simply for their anti-Semitism, but also for
whatever expansionist ambitions they may have. That’s what the sanctions
represent. That’s what the military option I’ve made clear I preserve
represents. And so I think it is not at all contradictory to say that
there are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but that
they also are interested in maintaining power, having some semblance of
legitimacy inside their own country, which requires that they get
themselves out of what is a deep economic rut that we’ve put them in,
and on that basis they are then willing and prepared potentially to
strike an agreement on their nuclear program.”

Except that there is no 'military option' (and no one ever believed Obama would be the one to employ it anyway) and if Obama gets his way there will be no sanctions. And by the way, what was Hitler - a 'community organizer'?

I made a decision on the spot—later partially regretted—not to deploy the H-bomb just then because I am a) very mindful of Godwin’s Law;
b) I don’t believe the Iranian regime is the modern-day equivalent of
the Nazi regime, in part because the Nazi regime is without peer; and c)
the invocation of Hitler’s name in these matters tends to set teeth too
much on edge. In retrospect, though, I should have raised it, because
Hitler is the perfect, but not singular, example of a world leader who
made decisions that seemed, to his adversaries, deeply irrational except
if you understood his desire to wipe out the Jews of Europe as an
actual overriding policy goal, a raison d’etre of his rule.
Anti-Semitism was not simply an “organizing tool” for him. And if you’re
paying attention, you will see that bringing about the end of the
sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East is a paramount political and
theological mission of the Iranian regime.

And so I was glad that Obama acknowledged the supreme leader’s
heartfelt anti-Semitism, and I’m glad that he understands that the
supreme leader seeks to do great harm to Israel. I suppose I part with
the president’s analysis on the question of exactly how much pain the
supreme leader believes Iran should absorb on behalf of this goal. Obama
believes the Iranian leadership will check its behavior in order to
avoid potentially catastrophic fallout. He may be right, but I would
like to see his administration place slightly less faith in the idea of
regime rationality.

Of course, there's a more cynical view of this - which I have alluded to many times, but with which I believe that Goldberg himself would take issue. That view holds that Obama is an anti-Semite (you can tell a man by the company that he keeps) and that Kerry may well be one as well. It's already been stated in polite society that Obama at least has a blind spot for anti-Semitism. In that view, Obama and Kerry are lulling much of the United States into complacency when they know full well Iran's desire to destroy the Jewish state.

2 Comments:

Naive, no. Willfully committing to a 21st Century Shoah, yes. I suppose one deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for paving the way for the annihilation of what had been described by a British diplomat as a shitty little country. After all, if it's not Feorge Bush's fault, it's the fault of the Jooz.

Obama and Kerry are hardcore Jew-haters, the evidence for this is overwhelming. And Goldberg himself is naive, and I (and others) would argue by some of the things he has written and endorsed, a self-hating Jew (at least some of the time). No he is not as bad as Kerry and Obama and BDS supporting Jews, no he doesn't support Iran getting nukes, but some of the things he has said re Israel and the Palestinians has been woeful and disgraceful.

It's incredible though that at this point in time, Kerry and Obama's anti-Semitism can even be debated.

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I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com